This is inevitable, and a terrible idea. It is based on two major assumptions:

Cell connections are slower than Wifi connections

Cell connections are unmetered and Wifi connections are not

These are both often wrong. My office sits in a cell signal black spot. I'm lucky to get one bar of 3G. Sadly, the wifi isn't up to much either (this isn't a problem as almost all my work goes over ethernet).

If, on the other hand, I walk 200 meters to the east, I find myself with a nice 4G signal that is (last time I measured it) 42 times faster than the wifi.

Today I've rubbed up against the annoying side of proprietary unreasonableness. Amazon Instant Video.

For reasons best know to themselves, the geniuses at Amazon have decided to put up the cost of Prime membership by 60%. As well as getting next day delivery on thousands of items, I can now also watch Amazon Instant Video - previously known as LoveFilm.

I'm in more-or-less the same boat. My Panasonic is a Blu-Ray player rather than a TV and I hadn't got to the point of discovering that I needed to pay for XBox Gold again (I let it lapse a year or so ago) to get the streaming video app.

So, I'm getting Amazon Video bundled with Amazon Prime and I have no good way to watch it on my decent screen / sound system.

If the new features were going to be bundled into the existing package, then that would be fine, but the renewal cost is awful. I won't be renewing when my current prime subscription is finished (I have a calendar entry set to remind me to cancel it before auto-renew kicks in).

I like the idea of @font-face, but some implementations leave a little to be desired.

I was trying to read a webpage on a 3G Internet connection and the font was taking more than a little while to download. Unfortunately, Chrome doesn't render text in a fallback font while it is waiting for the desired one to download.

The result is a wall of white space, interspersed by headings and bullet points.

The page contained 350kb of fonts, which isn't much these days when it is unusual for people to have slower than 10Mbps connections … at home … in the country where I live.

When you start dealing with mobile connections, which can be intermittent when moving, have weak signals in some locations and suffer from high levels of contention in busy urban areas, 350k is suddenly a lot of data for something that will prevent people from reading the text on your page.

As a developer, I'm leaning away from using font-face these days, the "show nothing until the font has loaded" approach in Chrome is too crippling when there are problems loading the fonts (NB: The CSS for this site was written before I wrote this entry).

As a user, I'm going to dig out something to strip the stylesheets from pages so I can read them if their fonts are missing.

So Opera isn’t dropping Presto for WebKit but for Blink, which is Google’s new fork of WebKit that exists, as far as I can tell, because Google and Apple have a hard time playing together nicely. (See this HN thread in which people make various claims).

Meanwhile Mozilla is teaming up with Samsung to write a new rendering engine (Servo) from scratch. One which, from first impressions, is very heavily geared towards mobile devices.

I’m going to have to revise my testing platforms before very much longer, aren’t I?